The road less traveled: a white man tackles white power.

Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White and White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son

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IN 1989, JACKIE OLIVE, now an intern with the Independent Television Service, was completing her graduate studies in documentary filmmaking at the University of Florida and working in the school's Office of Graduate Minority Programs. As she tells it, she was an example of the overachieving, overqualified Black student who could only afford to pursue a graduate degree because affirmative action admissions came with cash. "How are students like me looking to go to college this fall going to pay for it," asks Olive, "when these programs are being undermined all over the country?"

Olive's bleak take is understandable. Voters in three states have banned affirmative action programs. Now, Ward Connerly's "civil rights initiatives," as he calls them, are upcoming on ballots in Arizona, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado and South Dakota. Since Connerly's appeal to white voters' sense of fair play keeps winning, revisiting the work of white racial justice activist Tim Wise may help forge a better strategy for the fall elections.

White's 2005 book Affirmative Action: Racial Preference in Black and White was an attempt to beat back the "tell the white people what they want to hear" strategy that activists used against Connerly in California and Washington State. That approach lost. While the extensive data cited in Affirmative Action--from statistics showing how negligible the impact of affirmative action policies has been on whites to those refuting the myth that applicants of color are less qualified/prepared/apt to succeed--make the book academically acceptable, it is the conclusions Wise states so simply that give the book its real power.

"The arguments blaming [B]lack cultural traits for educational underachievement ... remain inaccurate and rooted in racist stereotypes," he wrote. "It is testimony to how entrenched racism and racist thinking are in this nation that ... attempts at blaming the victims have been so successful, despite the utter lack of evidence to support [this] position."

Wise's next book, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, continues his no-holds-barred attack on white liberal notions that it's counterproductive to lead with race and that in an ideal world all the low-income people of color learn how to behave and believe like professional-class whites (Wise calls this "reinforcing all the hierarchical nonsense we swear we oppose, much of it racist at its core."). Unlike Affirmative Action, this book uses personal narratives to make its point and may therefore have more impact. Part of the genius of Connerly's approach is that it reaches into people's heartfelt need to believe the United States is a meritocracy, and as a matter of integrity and pragmatism, Wise eschews marketing's focus group approach in favor of doing his own tugging at heartstrings.

"While it is not for people of color to put up with us, or to hold our hands, or to love us (especially if loving us puts them at great risk), it is definitely for those of us who are white to show that love even as we issue the challenge," he writes. "We are talking about our people after all: people who could be us but for some experience we had and they didn't."

One of Wise's most telling acknowledgements in his recent books--and on the lecture circuit he spends most of his time working--is that he is not saying anything people of color haven't said more often and more eloquently. At the Applied Research Center's "Facing Race" conference in New York City this year, Eva Paterson from Equal Justice Society put it like this: "People need to stop pretending it's about gender, because everybody knows it's about race." But who listens? Who gives Black or brown racial justice advocates a more-than-fulltime job speaking to community and educational groups across the country about race?

Still, Wise's work does give us a way to approach white allies in the struggle against the "new racisms" so clearly evident in the attacks on affirmative action and the quest for something that looks and feels like racial justice. We can combine hard, cold facts with passionate appeals to most everyone's deep desire to live in a society that is not at war with itself or half the globe. "No justice, no peace"--that rallying cry of the movements that gave us affirmative action in the first place--could be updated with the best promise progressives can make: know justice, know peace.